Evaluating Your Content Marketing: Measuring Attention

You have created your content marketing plan, and you have published all your content, but you don’t know how to evaluate your success? In some cases, your KPIs might help you, but mostly they only show the end game of your content marketing, not the actual performance of your content. But how do evaluate your content marketing? There are three factors you need to consider measuring: attention, action and approval. Let’s talk about attention first.

The Hard and the Soft Figures: Views and Time

Getting attention is the hardest part of any advertising campaign on any platforms for a company. Now, when the interfered noise is so much on the internet, it is even more challenging if not impossible to gain attention. Also distinguishing ourselves from others is harder than ever. But you’ve finally managed to get that attention: customers are arriving at your site. How do you measure their attention? To measure attention, you have two options: a hard and a soft figure.

The hard figure is your views. The primary user segmentations and site performance metrics are good indicators for attention measurement: page views, unique views, returning visits. On the bottom line: if your content performs well on the top level key figures, you have their attention. But that is just a simple yes or no. How do you evaluate more?

Soft figures can be helpful here. By measuring time spent on your site can get you an idea of how much attention paid to your content. If you had minor flows of users who are bouncing off your site – bounce rate is also a significant indicator – then you can say: your content certainly raised some eyebrows but proved to be invalid in a matter of seconds. Time spent on site is the best indicator you can get to measure your attention meter.

The Attention Celebrities and the Real Cult Leaders

Depends on what do you want but there are two options you can have. Either you have a massive attention with a short timeframe or a modest but loyal community. When you see huge site performance figures but little time on site and high bounce rate then you are a one-off celebrity on the net who will disappear with the first new wave. If you have a more modest figure but high time on site and low bounce rate, then your community is loyal and pays attention to you. Therefore, performance metrics for a site are a matter of context and correlations.

This week we will show you how to evaluate your content marketing performance. Please join our weekly Q&A where we answer all of your questions.